


See the Stars

by Onefalsestep



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M, One Shot, Porn with Feelings, Sex in a TARDIS, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 01:39:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11326005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Onefalsestep/pseuds/Onefalsestep
Summary: After the events of "World Enough and Time," the Doctor faces Missy and the Master, and finds no way to win. He surrenders to them both, and the Master uses the opportunity to attend to some unfinished business with the Doctor's former self (plus we learn that Missy always comes prepared for, well, everything).





	See the Stars

The problem with being a Time Lord was that you never won.

Not really. Not finally. There was no “finally.” “Finally” could mean a billion different things, on a billion different worlds. The end of the universe looked different to everyone. Things didn’t stay dead, not in the Doctor’s worlds. Stories didn’t end. And the moral balance: he could never tip it. Never stay in the black. Not for very long.

“I watched you, you know.” The Master’s voice was silky smooth, as it had always been. It insinuated its way into the Doctor’s thoughts, thrumming with a tempting rhythm: _let me in. Just let me in. You’ll like it, I promise_. They hadn’t shared each other’s thoughts since that night in the wasteland, when the Doctor heard the Master’s drums, tapping their way into his own consciousness. An almost unbearably intimate moment, and he knew it hung between them still. The thing about being a Time Lord was, those little moments haunted you forever.

“Watched me where?”

“Up there.” The Master pointed topside, where time ran faster. “There are still bits of him in you. Ragged, torn apart, but they’re there. He was already such a mess—it’s no wonder his new regeneration looks like his own grandfather. Me dying twice on him: well, it must’ve taken its toll on those boyish good looks.”

It took a moment for the Doctor to process his words. “I’m not…there was another regeneration. In between us. After the me that you…knew.”

“ _Two_?” The Master raised an eyebrow. “What did the last one look like? Because you look like hell, Doctor, I really must say. And I look, on the other hand, look bloody _fantastic_.” He swept his hand towards Missy, gesturing her closer. She walked over, and he wrapped an arm around her waist. “Goes to show good doesn’t pay, I guess. Evil ages so much more gracefully, don’t you think?”

Missy smiled up at him, eyes glinting, and the Doctor’s hearts burned. He’d been so close: he’d felt it. This time, she might take his hand. See the stars. Stand by his side, for—

For—

But there could be no forever, for them. Only mortals got that kind of ending. Only the beings blessed with short enough life spans to die heroes. Live long enough, and you’d burn a civilization or two. You’d lose friends, through your own stupidity, your own hubris: your own calculations. And throughout it all, the only person you cared about, the only person you _kept_ caring about through changing centuries and faces and companions might be a mass murdering psychopath who seemed to understand the same thing about time that you did: that it was terrifying, that there was no controlling it, no matter what you’d been taught, and that it would never, ever stop.

The Masters stepped towards the Doctor, moving as one. _Snakes_ , he thought. Threatening to reveal the knowledge he already knew, the knowledge he’d been running from all of his manic, multiplicitous lives: they were the same. He and the Master, they were exactly the same. No one was keeping score: even they’d forgotten most of the rounds. In the end, it all fell to dust anyway. Everything. Everything but them.

The Master—the Master who had held Earth hostage for a year, who had kept the Doctor close, though he had never treated him as tenderly as this—held out his hand. “To the TARDIS, then?” he asked, and the words slid through the Doctor’s mind, leaving electric terror in their wake. The moment he had walked into the TARDIS to find Missy there, glowing in the golden light, had filled him with the same irrestible fear: because he knew, then. He knew, and his both of his hearts refused to deny it. All he wanted, in this vast universe he kept trying to convince himself was a boundlessly joyous mystery every long day of his lives, was her. Her, him: the Master, in any form. With the power of Gallifrey at her fingertips, her hands sliding over his TARDIS. It had always been a sacred thing, inviting another into the sanctum of his ship. She alone knew the weight of what it meant. She alone—he, alone—

“ _Doctor_.” Missy took his hand. “It’s over. You can’t save your little—friends.” She said the word as though it left a bitter taste in her mouth. “Come with us. Let’s get some rest, hmm? Rest and—restoration.”

They looked at him, expectant, in unison, and the sensation was dizzying. The Master’s hypnotic field, doubled, multiplied, drawing him in. He’d only barely been able to resist the Master in one body all these years. With two: he shuddered to think what the Master was capable of.

The Master and Missy smiled. They saw right through him. They saw the shape of his thoughts, his desires, and they were knocking against the walls of his mind, asking to enter, to give him what he wanted. And he was frightened—so very frightened, as they led him back to the lifts—that he would open the door, and let them in.

 

* * *

 

He heard Nardole’s voice, echoing after them as they left him and Bill behind. It didn’t matter. Not anymore. Even River: even River didn’t matter. She had, he had loved her: but that was such a long time, ago, now. There had only been one person, one constant, in all his lives. And they were holding both his hands, guiding him into the TARDIS.

Missy, gleeful, led them to the Doctor’s bedroom. She must have scouted it out at some point during her unsupervised time in the TARDIS: of course it would have been her first stop, he thought, rolling his eyes. But then the Master slinked between them, and the Doctor’s blood ran cold. He and Missy had reconciled: at least a little, at least enough. They’d spent quiet afternoons together: they’d spoken of the past, and of truths he’d thought they might forever ignore. But this Master, the smirking, dark-eyed one: this had been the Master of drums and blood. The Master who had enslaved Earth, who had doomed its last lost children (still trapped there at the end of the universe, waiting for Utopia. The end of that story, he felt, was waiting for him still). This Master he didn’t trust, even if this Master had helped him send Rassilon back into hell. He didn’t trust him, but he wanted him here, at any cost: and that, as always, was his downfall.

“Doctor.” The Master raised a hand to his cheek, and the Doctor flinched. The Master laughed, delighted. “I have you well trained, don’t I? Must have been that year living as my dog. Such a shame, wasting your old body like that. Had I known this was the shape I’d see you in next time, I would have kept you young. Although—” He stroked the Doctor’s face, and the Doctor willed himself to remain still, steady against the contact. “It’s not too late. Not this time. If you’d just let me in, we could live those old lives again, you know.”

The Doctor shuddered. He saw Missy grin, and felt her ripple of anticipation, a pulse of _yes_ and _oh please_. There was that knocking again, from both of them. _Let us in_. _Let us_ _in_. And this time, he did.

Not all at once. It was the psychic equivalent of cracking a door, and the Master slipped inside first. In his mind’s eye the Doctor saw the Master as he’d been so very long ago, in the suit he wore on the Valiant, the one in which he’d died. He felt the Master nudge the door wider, and Missy crept in, both of them telepathically linked to him now, both peering inside the rooms of his consciousness, and he into theirs. He marveled at the silence in both their minds. He’d known the drums were gone, but the living fact of it, the quiet in a mind that had always pounded with rage, with rhythm: it took him aback. It scared him to think of the Master without that noise, somehow. What would he be—what would they both be, now?

The-Master-as-Harold-Saxon took the Doctor’s hand. “I watched you.” He ran his thumb over the Doctor’s wrist. “All the time, in that body. I couldn’t stop watching you. Even through the drums. I could never focus on anything for long, but you—you were the one thing commanding my attention. Through the call to war. Through the wasteland. You.” He leaned in to press a kiss to the Doctor’s lips. “Only you.”

The Doctor closed his eyes, drowning in the sensation: the Master, as he was now and as he was, and as Missy—as he would be—all seeing through the same mesmerizing eyes.“Good,” murmured the Master, “very good,” and the Doctor realized that the Master was projecting something onto him, an image, a reality, taking hold. The Doctor opened his eyes, drawing back a few inches, to see the shoes on his feet: Converse. At the base of a hauntingly familiar brown, pinstripe suit.

“This is how you want me?” he asked, and the voice came out wrong. It was a voice he’d lost, lives before. A voice the Master had resurrected, and the Doctor knew why.

“ _This_ is how I want you. And I want you to say it.”

“I—”

“ _Say it_.”

His old self, once so distant, came rushing back to him now. The self that had given the Master up for dead, not once, but twice. The self that knew he would have done anything—terrible things—just for the chance to see him again. To hold him again. “Master.”

“Louder.”

“Master.”

“Louder!”

An exhalation. A plea. The same word that had been ringing through his head, his entire endless life, his own drumbeats, his own delicious curse: “ _Master_.”

And then the Master’s lips were on his again, and Missy’s hands were pinning his arms behind his back, and they were both dragging him to the bed. “You can’t go back now, you know,” the Master was whispering in his ear. “Can’t keep us out. But this is what you wanted, isn’t it?” He pushed the Doctor back onto the bed, between Missy’s thighs, straddling him. Missy gripped his hands, keeping them in place above his head, keeping him taut, stretched-out, at her former self’s mercy. “ _Love_ the new look, darling,” she purred as the Master undid the Doctor’s tie: not the tie he’d been wearing when he entered the colony ship, but the tie he’d been wearing the day the Master died, still stained with the Master’s blood. “You could never wear it again, could you?” the Master said, his voice low, and passed it to Missy to tie the Doctor’s wrists.

They stripped him, four arms working as one (and that stupid joke about Venusian Aikido came back to him—and Nardole, oh god, Nardole—but that didn’t matter now. Nothing else mattered now). Their own clothes disappeared in piles on the floor, until he could feel every inch of their flesh, and the silk of the tie cutting into his wrists. They pressed their lips to his, to his neck, his chest, his ears, and they had a dozen different bodies now, and so did he. Projections of memories, of the exquisite longing they’d both felt for one another, every since that first day at the Academy, all the sweeter for being unfulfilled, until now—now—now—

Such a perverse word, in the Gallifreyan tongue. _Now_. Who was to say what now was, anyway? But this was now, and they were now, and they were his universes, and his timelines, and his endings, every one. They slinked along his sides, taking turns with the torture: the Master grasping, pulling the Doctor up for a brutal kiss; Missy, pushing him back, pushing him down, as she racked her nails across his ribs. The Master’s hand on his cock, and Missy’s mouth sliding down too, and if it felt like they were drawing it out for eons—if it felt like they were keeping him just on the edge of release, as they’d always done–well, what was a little more foreplay after all these impossibly long years between them?

They didn’t let him come. He thought for a moment they’d decided on this new form of agony for him together, that this had all been an awful plan, but then the Master crawled up his chest, taking the Doctor’s face in his hands. “Like this,” he said, “it’s good, isn’t it?” and the Doctor felt Missy grip his hips and arch them into place, and felt her slick something cool and liquid down the cleft of his arse. He looked up at the Master, mouthing _lube_? and the Master nodded—“She always keeps it on her,” he breathed, “don’t ask me why”—and the Doctor laughed, and then they both laughed, giddily, like they had back at the Academy, like they almost had so many times since then, and the laughing almost felt like more of a release than anything else, until Missy drew the Master into him, until the Master entered him, his eyes locked on the Doctor’s, and then the laughs became gasps, and cries, only, of “Master. Master. _Master_.”

Afterwards they fell into a tangle, the last two to three Time Lords in existence. The Master’s hair was mussed and Missy was radiant, and he loved them both. He’d hated himself for it, but he’d decided to stop. He would never win that war. Tomorrow one of them, or both, would try to burn another star. Tomorrow someone would bolt, someone would betray, someone would undo whatever progress this was, if it was progress at all. Tomorrow, whatever that meant. But when you lived in a time machine: well, you could always stop tomorrow coming, after all.

The Master kissed him again, long and languid, pulling gently at the Doctor’s lower lip as he pressed him down against the mattress. “I win,” he said, slapping the Doctor lightly on the cheek, just enough to sting—“You win,” said the Doctor, not caring if it was true, as long as the Master believed it: as long as he never went and died on him again. Missy wrapped herself up in them both, and they insinuated their way into each other’s encroaching dreams, dreams of red grass, and distant galaxies, and two young boys who desired nothing more than to travel the stars together, so very, very long ago.


End file.
